1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for an interactive voice response system. In particular the invention relates to a method and apparatus for controlling background effects in an interactive voice response dialogue.
2. Description of the Related Art
The telephone is a nearly universal means of communication. All businesses and most homes have one. In the world of e-business, the telephone is an important means of communication, as it gives customers more choice in the way they do business with a company. In particular, a Web site with voice processing can be useful in order to enable a company to expand Web-based business transactions to the telephone. Most people are becoming familiar with using the telephone to conduct various kinds of business including ordering goods from catalogs, checking airline schedules, querying prices, reviewing account balances, recording and retrieving messages, and getting assistance from company help desks. In each of these examples, a telephone call involves an agent performing the following: talking to the caller, getting information, entering that information into a business application, and reading information from that application back to the caller. Voice response technology, for example as provided by WebSphere Voice Response, allows one to automate this process.
WebSphere Voice Response can handle inbound calls, make outbound calls, can transfer calls, and can interact with callers using spoken prompts. Callers can interact with WebSphere Voice Response by using speech (with speech recognition) or the telephone keypad. WebSphere Voice Response responds by speaking information to callers, such information having been pre-recorded or synthesized from text (with text-to-speech). WebSphere Voice Response can access, store, and manipulate information on local or host databases, and on multiple databases on multiple computers. WebSphere Voice Response applications can store and play back messages, support multiple voice applications on a single host, share voice data, applications, and messages across multiple hosts, and allow a choice of application programming environments including VoiceXML, Java and state tables. VoiceXML is an industry-standard voice programming language, designed for developing DTMF and speech-enabled applications, which are then located on a central web server, in the same way as other web applications. WebSphere Voice Response Java can be used for developing voice applications on multiple WebSphere Voice Response platforms, or for integrating voice applications with multi-tier business applications. State tables can be used for optimizing performance or for using all the WebSphere Voice Response functions, including ADSI, TDD, Fax and Custom Servers.
An interactive voice response system (IVR) that plays background effects is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,040 to Socher, et al. (Socher). The Socher patent discloses a method and apparatus of synthesizing speech from a piece of input text. The method includes steps of retrieving the input text entered into a computing system and transforming the input text of at least one word of the input text to generate a formatted text for speech synthesis. The transforming step includes adding an audio rendering effect to the input text based on at least one word, the audio effect comprising background music, special effects and context sensitive sounds. However this IVR plays pre-recorded background music, pre-recorded special effects and pre-recorded context sensitive sounds and does not provide for runtime manipulation of the background music.